Jeremy's Seahorse Quilt

I'm working on a mixed media piece.  (Some of the background fabric was shown in yesterday's post.)  It will be a tryptich-style for the main elements, in a sea theme, but on a stenciled, painted, and quilted background, which looks like sand.

Using my Silhouette and a seaweed cut file from the Silhouette studio, I created a vinyl mask for the seaweed, then adhered it to the fabric and applied Lumiere paint.  However, it was too wet, and bled a lot around the stencil edges.  My son Jeremy wanted it, though, so I decided to use it as practice piece for the background to the mixed-media piece, and to give it to him when it's done.

With the Silhouette and a seahorse cutfile, I used Shiva paintsticks to add two seahorses.  Being a semi-solid, I didn't have trouble with the Shiva paint bleeding under the vinyl mask. After the paints had cured and been ironed, I was able to quilt the images today.  Using Madeira Glamour threads to add more sparkle (because Jeremy loves all things shiny), I added detail to the seahorses and outlined the seaweed.

When I showed it to Jeremy and asked if he wanted wavy lines for the water, he told me I needed to paint a few areas with blue - not too much - and use that for the water.  While he didn't realize it, it was a great, out-of-the-box challenge  for me.  I pulled out my Twinkling H2O watercolors to add the color and yet more shine.  (These paints have mica flakes in them for added shimmer.)   While it's not perfect, I like the way it came out and it was a great practice piece.

Now it's drying, and I hope to finish quilting in the water tomorrow, and get it bound (or perhaps edge finished with some fibers) and hanging in his room.  And then to complete the mixed media piece...

Surface Design Madness

Time got away from me and I'm finally posting about the surface design class I took with Susan Brubaker Knapp at the NC Quilt Symposium.

We started off playing with Tyvek - that plastic stuff they wrap houses in before putting on siding.  It got painted with Lumiere paints, then you place it between parchment paper and heat it with an iron and it gets all bubbly and the colors intensify.  Depending on which side (painted or not) is up, you get bubbles or craters.  The fish below is 3 pieces; the fins were odd shapes that shrunk like that on their own.  I did a little "surgery" on the fish body (the tail fins) to get the shape I wanted.  These are 3 separate pieces, but can now be glued or sewn onto whatever base I want to use.

The beads to the left of the fish are tyvek beads, made by painting, wrapping around skewers, then heating.  They were then wrapped with wire and beads.  The bit up at the top is angelina, heated on an inked rubber stamp. 

We did a lot with the Lumiere paints.  In the next image, fusible web was painted with Lumiere and when it was mostly dry, ironed onto fabric.  I had one large piece of fusible web, painted with blue and blue-green, and cut it in half.  You can see how the background color makes it look bluer (on the white fabric ) and more silver (on the black fabric).  The bits that peeled away were still wet when ironed, which could be used as a deliberate technique for making something look distressed.  But I'll have to be careful to place parchment paper over them if I have to iron them, unless I want to glue my iron to the ironing board!

This is lumiere painted onto steam a seam fusible web that had  been pre-wet.  The pre-wetting helped the paint colors run together.  It was ironed on wet.  The left side of the image below is the painted fusible web - bright and shiny.  However, I ended up liking the back side even more - some of the paint came through to the back, giving a subtle shine in organic shapes. I think it would be great for backgrounds.

We also played with diluted Lumiere.   I took a bit of my plain white fabric and dipped into diluted purple paint.  The shine remained, but I over-diluted it and it was a barely there lilac color after wringing out the fabric.  So I added a few globs of teal and purple and smooshed the fabric all around and ended up with this.  I'm currently using it as background fabric for some digitally-printed images.

We played with Shiva sticks too, using them on top of templates.  I was boring and just did one color per plate.  Some of the more adventurous gals mixed a bunch of images and created their own multi-patterned fabrics.

And here is, hands-down, my favorite piece of the day.  We used Caran d'ache Neocolor crayons directly on the fabric to color an image, then used water and paintbrushes to paint them out.  I am not practiced at drawing, but I do know (thanks to the inspiration wednesday videos that Donna Downey posts on her blog) how to draw a poppy.  So I did that with purple crayons, and gave them a gold/orange background.  I'll be quilting this piece and hanging it in my office/sewing room because it's just so bright and cheerful. 

Susan is a fabulous teacher - she did a great job of explaining her techniques, the various modifications that could be made, and then stepping back and letting us "play".  I'd happily take another class with her!  Here is a link to her blog, Blue Moon River.